Data compression, either lossless or lossy, is desirable in many applications in which data is to be stored in, and/or read from, a memory. By compressing data before storage of the data in a memory, the amount of data transferred to the memory may be reduced. An example of data for which data compression is particularly useful is image data, such as depth data to be stored in a depth buffer, pixel data to be stored in a frame buffer and texture data to be stored in a texture buffer. These buffers may be any suitable type of memory, such as cache memory, separate memory subsystems, memory areas in a shared memory system or some combination thereof.
A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) may be used to process image data in order to determine pixel values of an image to be stored in a frame buffer for output to a display. GPUs usually have highly parallelised structures for processing large blocks of data in parallel. There is significant commercial pressure to make GPUs (especially those intended to be implemented on mobile devices) operate at lower power levels. Competing against this is the desire to use higher quality rendering algorithms on faster GPUs, which thereby puts pressure on a relatively limited resource: memory bandwidth. However, increasing the bandwidth of the memory subsystem might not be an attractive solution because moving data to and from, and even within, the GPU consumes a significant portion of the power budget of the GPU. The same issues may be relevant for other processing units, such as central processing units (CPUs), as well as GPUs.
The embodiments described below are provided by way of example only and are not limiting of implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known methods of data compression.